The most important character in Absolute Evil #1 never sits at the table. He’s watching from somewhere else, and when the meeting’s over he’s the one who decides it needs one more chair.
The Absolute Justice #1 cover went up on the screen in Room 405 at New York Comic Con on Friday. Jason Aaron and Juan Ferreyra, five issues, April 2027, Martian Manhunter bringing the heroes together for the first time. And the twist DC has been building for a year: in this universe, the Justice League is the enemy. That part isn’t news anymore. How Al Ewing staged the meeting where that League gets its name is, because he staged it like a scene, and a scene tells you who’s really in charge.
Ewing opens on a man giving up his name
The first thing you see in Absolute Evil #1 is 1951. A closed-door session of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Hawkman sitting in front of it. He says his name, his face and his life have always been his own business, and then he says it’ll be a real pleasure to tell them what they want to know. A hero walks into a room full of power and trades his secret identity for a seat.
That’s the whole issue in one cold open, and I don’t think it’s an accident. Every person at the table later in the book is somebody who already made that trade, or never had anything to trade in the first place.
Look at how each of them walks in. Hector Hammond gets wanded at security and tells the guard his business is worth more than most countries. Veronica Cale introduces herself as National Security Adviser and then just says it: I’m the boss. Ra’s al Ghul tells the room time is more precious than any resource on Earth and he doesn’t enjoy jokes. Elenore Thawne is the scientist in the green jacket, and she’s the one who asks Cale what the point is. Because the Hawkman from the cold open, Mr. Hall, is who Cale sends for when Hammond starts running his mouth, and he walks in and drops Oliver Queen’s body on the table. Ra’s likes that. That’s how they solve problems, he says: not in a month, in a day. Cale calls it a demonstration.
Government, money, science and muscle, all in one room, and every one of them is there because the others are useful.
The slideshow is the mission statement
Cale walks them through the case files before anybody argues. Wesley Dodds, the Sandman, found shot dead in his suit in 1939, and a year later the military has a brand new nerve gas. Ted Grant, Wildcat, overhears a factory inspector taking a bribe and then comes into fifty thousand dollars tax free, and sixteen people die in that factory over the next five years making the gas that won the war. Iron Munro won’t name names in front of HUAC, and somebody files the wrong paperwork and his shack in the Nevada desert ends up in a chemical weapons test.
Then Cale says the line I think the entire Absolute line turns on. The greatest danger these new heroes pose isn’t what they can do. It’s what they could inspire.
Read that again as a filmmaker. The man melting tanks with his eyes in Brazil is in Cale’s briefing too, and Cale skips right past him to the people watching. That’s a fear of an image, of a story getting out, and it tells you exactly what kind of fight Absolute Justice is going to be. You don’t beat a story with a bigger punch.
Nobody at that table is a friend
You can call this a team-up of supervillains, and the cover practically begs you to. But listen to how they talk to each other. Cale’s pitch is what power can do for money and what money can do for power. Hammond says he doesn’t need Lazarus Corp to solve his problems, thanks. Somebody puts Thawne’s escaped experiment from Fort Fox on the table and it turns into a bidding war: how many millions, how many favors. And when the man giving the toast finally raises his glass, he tells them friendship with any of them would be an insult. They can be allies.
That’s a board meeting. People who don’t like each other, sitting in a room because the quarterly numbers depend on it.
What holds the board together is the toast, and it’s the best writing in the issue. The man giving it talks about a particle his lab found, the Omega Particle, and he says it has a moral dimension. The forces of the universe trend in one direction, he says. A moral gravity, pulling down, keeping everything that is in its place. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. This is not chance. This is not accident. This is design. He calls Oliver Queen a spoiled little anarchist while two men in suits drag the body out behind him. Then he toasts the moral arc bending toward justice, to an ordered world, and to our Justice League, in a room he calls the Watchtower, high above the herd. Turn the page and the title card reads ABSOLUTE JUSTICE.
He stole the line. The arc of the moral universe bending toward justice is the line Martin Luther King Jr. made famous, and Ewing hands it to a man who believes inequality is physics. As a writing choice that’s genuinely one of the meanest things I’ve seen in a superhero comic, and I mean that as a compliment. The villain’s so sure the universe agrees with him that he quotes the other side to prove it.
The man who isn’t at the table
The scene turns after the toast, and it’s why I can’t call this the Joker’s League, even though that’s how most people describe it. The man giving the toast is never named in the issue. The others say he never jokes. If you’ve been reading Absolute Batman, you know a man described exactly that way, and his name is Jack Grimm. He’s the one with the glass in his hand.
Somebody else built the room. After the meeting, Brainiac talks it through like a casting director going over an ensemble. Hammond balances Ra’s and the Hawkman, so their egos can focus on one another. Thawne’s skepticism matches Cale, the true believer. The man who doesn’t joke is a problem Brainiac wants to understand so he can neutralize him. And the League, he says, needs one more member to be complete. Last page, a phone rings in a happy house where a man is telling Dora he can’t think of a single thing he wants, and he picks up: this is Lex Luthor.
If you read Absolute Superman #16 and #17, you’ve already seen what comes next for that man. Brainiac shows up at his door, tells him he’s nothing like the man of ambition he’s meant to be, and leaves him broken, begging him to seize the opportunity. That’s a man casting a part.
What I’m calling now
My call, dated today, and you can hold me to it in April: Lex Luthor is in that last chair before Absolute Justice #1 opens. And when the event is over, the person who turns out to be running this League is Brainiac, not the man who made the toast.
There’s a fair argument against me. Brainiac might just be Absolute Superman’s villain borrowing a scene, and the League could stay exactly what it looks like: five powerful people and a hired muscleman who can’t stand each other. If that’s how it plays, the board read still holds and the Brainiac half of my call is wrong. I’m fine with that. That’s the point of saying it out loud before the book comes out.
The cold open is the part that tells you where April goes. Ewing started the whole thing with a hero signing his name over to a committee. In April, Martian Manhunter has to walk into a world where the heroes who came before all made that trade or got buried for refusing it, and ask a new group to refuse it together. That’s the story. Everything else is who’s sitting where.
Who do you think takes the last chair? Tell me in the comments on my walk into the Absolute Universe panel.
